This post comes to you from the Bahamas, where I’m visiting friends for the week, via my friend Daurie in Mexico.

Daurie and I met years ago as high school students in Vermont; it’s a cliche to say we became fast friends, but, well, we did. I would sleep over her house on school nights so we could get up at six in the morning to go for four-mile runs out past her father’s deer farm. For my sixteenth birthday she threw me a surprise party—I can remember about ten of us staying up the whole night in the woods behind her house, in thick snow, playing under the moonlight. She is also the first person I cooked spinach with; the recipe called for something like “a whole bunch” and that just seemed absurd, so we used only about 1 cup. To our disbelief, after cooking we were left with about two bites of sautéed spinach.

Nowadays Daurie teaches at the Centro Cultural de Lenguas, a language school in downtown Morelia, in Michoacán, Mexico. As a very cool assignment, she had her intensive students write a traditional Mexican recipe in English, with a small paragraph introducing the dish. Then I would select the best one and publish the winning recipe here on Mostly Food.

It was difficult choosing a winner. All the recipes—from chilaquiles to stuffed poblano peppers—were charming, funny, well written. In the end, I selected the gazpacho, in part because as summer rolls around, this would make for a refreshing bite—and I like the part about Gaspar and his missing teeth. As you’ll see it’s different than Spanish gazpacho, which is a cold soup mainly of pureed tomatoes. This version is fruit based: pineapple, mango, jicama and fresh orange juice, and comes to us courtesy of Omar, Vicente, and Alfredo (pictured in the bottom photo).

Mexican Gazpacho

One time in a fruit store, when the fruit was chopped in big pieces, an old man came to buy fruit. However, he had a problem with his teeth because he only had a few them. Then the old man asked the owner of the place for a favor. He said, “Please chop the fruit in little pieces, because I can’t eat it in big pieces.” So the man chopped the fruit and put it in a glass with some orange juice. That’s how the old man always came back to buy the same fruit. One time the man asked his name. It was Gaspar and for that reason the name is Gazpacho.

Preparation time: 20 min.
Servings: 7

Ingredients:
1 Pineapple
5 Mangos
2 Jicamas
1 Liter Orange juice
1 Cup. Grated cheese
2 Limes
1/2 Tsp. Salt
Chile piquin to taste
Valentina salsa to taste

Preparation
1. Wash the fruit.
2. Peel the fruit and cut into small pieces.
3. Put the ingredients in a bowl and mix.
4. Add the orange juice.
5. Cut the 2 limes in half and squeeze the juice on the mix.
6. Add grated cheese, salt, chile piquin and valentina salsa to taste.
7. It’s ready to enjoy.